Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Bengal, India, and grew up in Kerala. She got her degree in architecture from the Delhi School of Architecture, but became a screenwriter instead, writing scripts for movies and television in India. She lives in Delhi with her husband, film-maker Pradeep Kishen.

Her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), won the prestigious Booker Prize and became an international best-seller. The book, which took Roy five years to write, is not strictly autobiographical, but she says the sadness of the book * has stayed with her, and that she may never write another novel.